‘Snake-Bot’ Evolves into Shorter, Smarter ‘Worm-Bot’

Designers of military robots have long looked to the animal kingdom for inspiration. Specifically, they seek to understand “gaits” — that is, how creatures have adapted for moving across different kinds of terrain. For instance, it’s no accident that the Army’s mountain-climbing Big Dog bot prototype has legs like a mule.

One of the holy grails of these “biomorphic” robotics is the robot snake. A long segmented body is adaptable for a wide range of tasks, potentially “overcoming obstacles that are a significant fraction of its length, crossing slippery surfaces, ascending poles, climbing steep slopes and optically sensing its immediate surroundings,” according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. A robo-snake slither undetected through grass and raise its head to look around, or even climb a tree for a better view. It could be the perfect robot spy.

U.S. firm Sarcos, part of Raytheon, has a head start on robot snakes, having built several versions of its so-called “Multi Dimensional Mobility Robot” in response to Darpa solicitations. But Sarcos has run into some of the big obstacles inherent in snake-bot design. The same complex gait that makes a snake such an adaptable critter makes it super tough to emulate. “It’s complex locomotion,” Sarcos designer Stephen Jacobsen said. Building on the work of Sarcos and other companies, an Israeli bot-maker thinks it has figured out the key to a better robot snake, by “evolving” it into a robot worm.

Last year, Israel’s Technion built its first robo-serpent, depicted in the video above. Like most robot snakes, that model featured a dozen or more segments all controlled by a single, central processor — just like a real snake with its brain and nervous system. Recently, Technion unveiled a second-generation version of its snake that has a “brain” embedded in each of just eight segments, like an earthworm that keeps on creeping even after you cut it in half. Every link in the new bot’s body includes “logic and control processors, inertial sensors, servo actuators, power source, communications and sensors,” according to Defense Update. That should render the shorter snake smarter, more flexible and more resistant to damage.

The Israeli army will get first crack at testing the new, 15-pound worm-bot prototype, Defense Update reports.